Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels

INTRODUCTION

When you feel good, your brain is releasing dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, or endorphin. You want more of these great feelings because your brain is designed to seek them. But you don’t always get it, and that’s natural too. Our brain doesn’t release a happy chemical until it sees a way to meet a survival need, like food, safety, and social support. And then, you only get a quick spurt before your brain returns to neutral so it’s ready for the next survival opportunity. This is why you feel up and down. It’s nature’s operating system!

Many people have habits that are bad for survival. How does that happen if our brain rewards behaviors that are good for survival? When a happy-chemical spurt is over, you feel like something is wrong. You look for a reliable way to feel good again, fast. Anything that worked before built a pathway in your brain. We all have such happy habits: from snacking to exercising, whether it’s spending or saving, partying or solitude, arguing or making up. But none of these habits can make you happy all the time because your brain doesn’t work that way. Every happy-chemical spurt is quickly metabolized and you have to do more to get more. You can end up overdoing a happy habit to the point of unhappiness.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could turn on your happy chemicals in new ways? Wouldn’t it be nice to feel good while doing things that are actually good for you? You can, when you understand your mammal brain. Then you’ll know what turns on the happy chemicals in nature, and how your brain can substitute new habits for old ones. You can design a new happy habit and wire it into your neurons. This book helps you do that in forty-five days.

You don’t need much time or money to build a new neural pathway; you need courage and focus, because you must repeat a new behavior for forty-five days whether or not it feels good.

Why doesn’t it feel good to start a new habit? Your old habits are like well-paved highways in your brain. New behaviors are hard to activate because they’re just narrow trails in your jungle of neurons. Unknown trails feel dangerous and exhausting, so we’re tempted to stick to our familiar highways instead. But with courage and commitment, you will build a new highway, and on Day Forty-Six, it will feel so good that you will build another.

Warning: This book is about your brain, not about other people’s brains. If you are in the habit of blaming your neurochemical ups and downs on others, you will not find support here. But you needn’t blame yourself, either—you can make peace with your mammalian neurochemistry instead of finding fault with it. This book shows you how.

We’ll explore the brain chemicals that make us happy and unhappy. We’ll see how they work in animals, and why they have a job to do. Then we’ll see how the brain creates habits, and why bad ones are so difficult to break. Finally, we’ll embark on a forty-five-day plan that explains how to choose a new behavior and how to find the courage and focus you need to repeat it without fail. This edition of the book contains a lot of new exercises and interactive features that help you take each step. You will like the results—a happier, healthier you!

1 | YOUR INNER MAMMAL

Our Survival-Focused Brain

Your brain is inherited from people who survived. This may seem obvious, but when you look closer at the huge survival challenges of the past, it seems like a miracle that all of your direct ancestors kept their genes alive. You have inherited a brain that is focused on survival. You may not think you are focused on survival, but when you worry about being late for a meeting or eating the wrong food, your survival brain is at work. When you worry about being invited to a party or having a bad hair day, your survival brain sees the risk of social exclusion, which was a very real threat to your ancestors. Once you’re safe from immediate threats like hunger, cold, and predators, your brain scans for other potential threats. It’s not easy being a survivor!

Consciously, you know that bad hair is not a survival threat, but brains tuned to social opportunities made more copies of themselves. Natural selection built a brain that rewards you with a good feeling when you see an opportunity for your genes and alarms you with a bad feeling when you lose an opportunity. No conscious intent to spread your genes is necessary for a small social setback to trigger your natural alarm system.

These responses are rooted in your brain’s desire to survive, but they’re not hard-wired. We are not born to seek specific foods or avoid specific predators the way animals often are. We are born to wire ourselves from life experience. We start building that wiring from the moment of birth. Anything that made you feel good built pathways to your happy chemicals that tell you this is good for me. Whatever felt bad built pathways that say this is bad for me. By the time you were seven years old, your core circuits were built. Seven may seem young, since a seven-year-old has little insight into its long-term survival needs. But seven years is a long time for a creature in nature to be practically defenseless. This is why we end up with core neurochemical circuits that don’t always match up with our survival needs.

In short, your brain has some quirks:

It cares for the survival of your genes as urgently as it cares for your body.

It wires itself from early experience, though that’s an imperfect guide to adult survival.

This is why our neurochemical ups and downs can be so hard to make sense of.

How Do Chemicals Make Us Happy?

The feeling we call happiness comes from four special brain chemicals: dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin, and serotonin. These happy chemicals turn on when your brain sees something good for your survival. Then they turn off, so they’re ready to activate again when something good crosses your path.

Each happy chemical triggers a different good feeling:

Dopamine produces the joy of finding things that meet your needs—the Eureka! I got it! feeling.

Endorphin produces oblivion that masks pain—often called euphoria.

Oxytocin produces the feeling of being safe with others—now called bonding.

Serotonin produces the feeling of being respected by others—pride.

I don’t define happiness in those terms, you may say. That’s because neurochemicals work without words. But you can easily see how strong these motivations are in others. And research illuminates these impulses in animals. As for yourself, your verbal inner voice may seem like your whole thought process until you know the chemistry of your inner mammal.

FOUR HAPPY CHEMICALS

Dopamine: the joy of finding what you seek

Endorphin: the oblivion that masks pain

Oxytocin: the comfort of social alliances

Serotonin: the security of social importance

How Do Happy Chemicals Work?

Happy chemicals are controlled by tiny brain structures that all mammals have in common: the hippocampus, amygdala, pituitary, hypothalamus, and other parts collectively known as the limbic system. The human limbic system is surrounded by a huge cortex. Your limbic system and cortex are always working together to keep you alive and keep your DNA alive. Each has its special job:

Your cortex looks for patterns in the present that match patterns you connected in the past.

Your limbic system releases neurochemicals that tell your body this is good for you, go toward it, and this is bad for you, avoid it. Your body doesn’t always act on these messages because your cortex can override them. If the cortex overrides a message, it generates an alternative and your limbic system reacts to it. So your cortex can inhibit your limbic system momentarily, but your mammal brain is the core of who you are. Your cortex directs attention and sifts information, but your limbic brain sparks the action.

Each Chemical Has a Job

Your inner mammal rewards you with good feelings when you do something good for your survival. Each of the happy chemicals motivates a different type of survival behavior:

Dopamine motivates you to get what you need, even when it takes a lot of effort.

Endorphin motivates you to ignore pain, so you can escape from harm when you’re injured.

Oxytocin motivates you to trust others, to find safety in companionship.

Serotonin motivates you to get respect, which expands your mating opportunities and protects your offspring.

You might come up with different motivations in your verbal brain, but your inner mammal decides what feels good.

HAPPY SURVIVAL MOTIVES

Dopamine: seek rewards

Endorphin: ignore physical pain

Oxytocin: build social alliances

Serotonin: get respect from others

The mammal brain motivates a body to go toward things that trigger happy chemicals and avoid things that trigger unhappy chemicals. You can restrain yourself from acting on a neurochemical impulse, but then your brain generates another impulse, seeking the next-best way to meet your survival needs. You’re not a slave to your animal impulses, but nor do you just operate on pure data, even if you believe you are doing that. You are always looking for a way to feel good, deciding whether to act on it, and then looking for the next best way of feeling good.

Good Feelings Help Animals Meet Needs

Animals accept their neurochemical impulses without expecting a verbal rationale. That’s why animals can help us make sense of our own brain chemicals. The goal here is not to glorify animals or primitive impulses; it is to know what turns on our happy chemicals.

For example, a hungry lion is happy when she sees prey she can reach. This is not philosophical happiness, but a physical state of arousal that releases energy for the hunt. Lions often fail in their hunts, so they choose their targets carefully to avoid running out of energy and starving to death. When a lion sees a gazelle she knows she can get, she’s thrilled. Her dopamine surges, which revs up her motor to pounce.

A thirsty elephant is happy when he finds water. The good feeling of quenching his thirst triggers dopamine, which makes permanent connections in his neurons. That helps him find water again in the future. He need not try to learn where water is. Dopamine simply paves a neural pathway. The next time he sees any sign of a water hole, electricity zips down the path to his happy chemicals. The good feeling tells him here is what you need. When he’s exhausted and dehydrated, a sign of a reward at hand triggers the good feeling that spurs him on. Without effort or intent, happy chemicals promote survival.

But happy chemicals don’t flow constantly. The lion only gets more happy chemicals when she finds more prey, and the elephant only releases them when he sees a way to meet a need. There is no free happy chemical in the state of nature. Good feelings evolved because they get us to do things that promote survival.

Comparing the Limbic Systems and Cortexes of a Variety of Animals

Animals make survival decisions with very little cortex. Their limbic system is enough to decide what’s good for them. It motivates them to approach when a good feeling is released and to avoid when a bad feeling is released. This simple system kept our animal ancestors alive for millions of years and is still working inside us.

The following figure shows how the basic chassis of our brain stayed the same while the size of the parts changed immensely. Nature tends to build on what’s there instead of starting over with a blank sheet. Mammals built onto the reptile brain and humans built onto the mammal brain. We humans have a large stock of extra neurons ready to wire in new experience. Reptiles have a miniscule stock of neurons so they rarely adapt to new experience. But the reptile brain is skilled at scanning the world for threats and opportunities. If you ever feel like you are of two minds, or that your mind is going in different directions, this chart makes it easy to see why.

Comparing brain parts

How the Human Limbic System and Cortex Work Together

Your big cortex makes you different from other animals. You can keep building new neural pathways and thus keep fine-tuning your efforts to meet your needs. But man does not live by cortex alone. You need your limbic system to know what’s good for you. Your cortex sees the world as a chaos of raw detail until your limbic system creates the feeling that something is good or bad for you. You may have gotten the idea that your limbic brain is the bad guy and your cortex is the good guy, but it’s more helpful to know how they need each other. Your limbic system needs your cortex to make sense of your pleasure and pain. But your cortex cannot produce happy chemicals. If you want to be happy, you have to get it from your limbic system.

The limbic system cannot process language. When you talk to yourself, it’s all in your cortex. That’s why the limbic system never tells you in words why it activates a happy or unhappy chemical. So you might think, I’m not feeling that way just because you didn’t hear yourself verbally decide, for example, I will be mad at her or I am afraid to do that—but you actually are feeling that way.

How Your Experiences Create Neural Trails

Your feelings are unique. You turn on your happy chemicals with unique neural pathways built from your individual experience. That’s why we react differently to the same situation even though we are all reacting with the same basic survival equipment.

Building Individual Trails

Happy moments in your past connected neurons that are there, ready to spark more happy chemicals the next time you’re in similar circumstances. Unhappy moments in your past connected neurons that are there telling you what to avoid.

Each time you have an experience, your senses take in the world and trigger electricity in your brain. That electricity flows in your brain like water flows in a storm—it finds the paths of least resistance. The paths you’ve already built give your electricity a place to flow, and that shapes your response to the experience.

Neurochemicals pave these pathways the way asphalt paves a dirt road. Repetition also paves your pathways. Some of your neural trails develop into superhighways because you’ve activated them repeatedly and neurochemically. For example, a child who gets a lot of respect when she fixes her parents’ computer builds a pathway that expects more good feelings when she does more to help people with computers. So she repeats the behavior, and the pathway builds. We end up with billions of pathways to channel our electricity, and they allow us to create meaning from the flood of inputs reaching our senses.

Your Neural Guidance System

The trails you have built thus far in your life combine to make up your neural guidance system. The system might not be what you’d design today if you started from scratch, but it guides your reactions to the situations you encounter on a daily basis. Your inner mammal has no reason to doubt its own reactions because they’re built from your actual life experiences. You don’t notice your neural guidance system because you built it without conscious intent. That’s why it’s hard to build new trails: You don’t know how you built the old ones.

Familiar Neural Pathways Are Easy to Travel . . . but That’s Not Always Good

Your neural pathways make it easy for you to like some things and dislike others. You may find yourself liking things that are not especially good for you and fearing things that actually are good for you. Why would a brain that evolved for survival build such quirky circuits?

Because we’re designed to store experiences, not to delete them. Most of the time, experience holds important lessons. It helps you go toward whatever helped in the past and avoid whatever hurt. But the pathways of past experience can also